I still have the Lost Treasures of Infocom on my palm and play all the time and see Steve Meretzky one in a while at the PostMortem game dev meetings here in Boston, very funny guy. I can't tell you how many times I have had to explain my "It is dark, you are likely to be eaten by a grue" T-shirt to people under 30 or over 40, seems it is a 10 year window where we were obsessed with text adventures.

The text adventure scene is still pretty active with the inform interpreter still being used and the new TADS interpreter. There is a lot of great home-brew text adventures out there. You can get most of them here ifArchive.org

If anyone is interested I added text-to-speech to the WinFrotz interpreter to help blind gamers play the old text adventure games without the need for screen reader software, you can check it out here: ifTTS, here is an example of the start of Zork II.

You’re running csh and my shell is bash,You’re the tertiary storage; I’m the L1 cache.I’m a web crawling spider; you an Internet mosquito;You thought the 7-layer model referred to a burrito.You’re a dialup connection; I’m a gigabit LAN.I last a mythical man-month; you a one-minute man.It’s like I’m running Thunderbird and you’re still stuck with Pine,Which is why I think it’s time for me to KILL DASH NINE.

'Behold! It is not over unknown seas but back over well-known years that your quest must go; back to the bright strange things of infancy and the quick sun-drenched glimpses of magic that old scenes brought to wide young eyes.'

The text adventure scene is still pretty active with the inform interpreter still being used and the new TADS interpreter. There is a lot of great home-brew text adventures out there. You can get most of them here ifArchive.org

DEFINITELY going to check that out... Thanks for the tip!There is one game I would be interested in that I can't find on Google either. It was a text adventure written to take advantage of Apple II's split-screen graphics mode (top half of the screen was graphic mode and the bottom would display 5 or 6 lines of text) I think it was called "Cliffhanger" or some such, but my memory fails me.Which is probably why I can't find it...

If anyone is interested I added text-to-speech to the WinFrotz interpreter to help blind gamers play the old text adventure games without the need for screen reader software,

Nice!

If you enjoy the NerdCore stuff and MC Frontalot check out this site

Didn't even know there was a whole genre... Closest thing I've seen to that is a Seattle hardcore metal band called Bloodhag that writes songs about books, their authors and literacy in general. One of their albums is a book!

Text adventures were the most amazing thing I had ever seen when I was a freshman in high school just learning about computers. The first thing I learned was that I had a long way to go...

Text adventures were the most amazing thing I had ever seen when I was a freshman in high school just learning about computers. The first thing I learned was that I had a long way to go...

We must of been in High School at the same time.. I was playing Zork II on my Epson 8088 my freshman year.. good times...

There is one game I would be interested in that I can't find on Google either. It was a text adventure written to take advantage of Apple II's split-screen graphics mode (top half of the screen was graphic mode and the bottom would display 5 or 6 lines of text) I think it was called "Cliffhanger" or some such, but my memory fails me.

I've collected a ton of emulators and games for multiple platforms, but I have not collected any Apple II stuff yet.

'Behold! It is not over unknown seas but back over well-known years that your quest must go; back to the bright strange things of infancy and the quick sun-drenched glimpses of magic that old scenes brought to wide young eyes.'